Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

  “Yeah,” I said faintly.

  “So. How are you going to get through?”

  I said I didn’t really know, but that I was sure I’d be fine.

  “Are you reading?”

  “Yes. A lot.”

  “Journaling?”

  No. My own voice was to be avoided in all forms.

  “Praying?”

  Um.

  “Meditating?”

  I shook my head.

  “Energy work? Dream work?”

  I set down my mug.

  “Hang on,” she said, tapping the kitchen table. “Be right back.” I was left with the old sashed windows. The farm was fallow but the fields hadn’t yet given way to subdivisions, so the wavy glass revealed two blocks of color, land and blue. The birds over the fields were starlings. Phoenix had told me this when we were younger.

  Mrs. Weinberg returned with a few dog-eared paperback books. Her bracelets and boot buckles rattled. I’d never seen Manhattan and I didn’t read Vogue, so I didn’t know what to make of her clothes or buzzed hair. She might have been an assassin.

  “You know, I’m kind of a hippie,” she said. “And this is a little bit woo-woo, but if you’re going to go back there, you’re going to have to find some faith.” She set the books on the table.

  “Carlos Castaneda,” I read, mispronouncing the name.

  She corrected me.

  “Sorry.”

  She touched my arm. “You’re not always supposed to know.”

  “Okay.”

  “Ever met a shaman?”

  I shook my head.

  “You sure?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “Borrow these. If they work, great. If not, just set them aside. But I’ve found some of the ideas here to be very helpful at times.”

  When she said at times I thought I heard the memory of cancer. I wondered for a moment if it pained her to give away these books, even if she trusted me to return them. Might she need them for her own daughter? Or had my old friend Fee already transcended these sorts of challenges, finished her growing up?

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “Very sure.” The bright tulip smile. “Take your time. Enjoy them.”

  She had a set of clear beads on a string around her wrist, and she was rolling and smacking these softly as she considered me. I worried that Mrs. Weinberg would give me the bracelet too, whatever it was, but she kept that for herself.

  After the call with Bill Matthews, my parents began holding conversations related to St. Paul’s together in my dad’s office, in the den down at the end of the hall, with the phone on speaker. Dad took notes on pads of graph paper. He wrote with a mechanical pencil that had a little silver cap he removed to expose the eraser. Everything was replaceable—eraser, lead, even the tiny cap—and he kept the same utensils, one blue and one red, for years. He was a lefty, producing a tiny line of lead on the page, and the little boxes on the graph paper helped him square his script.

  I was not supposed to be around for the St. Paul’s phone calls. Mom and Dad were protecting me. But because the subject matter was so floridly intimate, I felt cored every time they sequestered themselves to talk. I wedged myself into my window upstairs or paced the border on the dining room carpet. They would either come find me immediately, or they would say nothing at all. The issue never for one moment left us alone. My advisers refused to call us back, and my parents were walking around red-eyed. Mom insisted that the school was engaging in a cover-up, but I blocked her out. What was covered up? I couldn’t have felt more exposed. Her ferocity frightened me. Dad seemed to agree with me: “Let’s just see how they respond,” he counseled her. “Let’s just see what they do.”

  It didn’t help that I did not yet understand how the school was handling our affairs. Nobody had filled me in on what they should have done legally, and I’d had little hope for any moral remedy in the first place.

  “I’m telling you,” she’d say, Cassandra-like. “They will bury our daughter before they let this get out.”

  I didn’t understand: get out where? Bury me how?

  My parents figured they were sparing me by not filling me in on every detail. I thought I was sparing them by not letting them know anything about how I had survived. That the former would soon collide with the latter was inevitable and obvious. And as much as I dreaded it, I almost wished for the arrival of the reckoning I felt I deserved.

  One day Mom came bashing through the dining room door and said, as though the room were waiting to hear it, “The district attorney said he’s had enough with St. Paul’s School.”

  In the summer our dining room table was empty. The silver candlesticks were on the sideboard, everything else tucked away. A foxed mirror from my great-grandmother’s house reflected the backyard. Suburban green.

  I stopped pacing. “What does that mean?”

  “It means he wants to bring charges against those…boys, because they were of age and you were fifteen, and because things like this have been happening at the school for years and the school has been burying it. He’s been waiting ten years to go after St. Paul’s. He said that. You are the smoking gun.”

  I understood language like “burying it” and “smoking gun” to belong to my mother—some fire and brimstone came naturally to her, and never more than when she felt wronged. So I discounted this news a bit, automatically, on account of rhetoric.

  But Mom had new authority now. She repeated, “The district attorney, Lacy.” He was the rook behind the queen. My dad had taught me to play chess when I was tiny. You can clear the board with that combination.

  My voice sounded small. I was still hung up on smoking gun. “Does that mean I can’t go back?”

  “They’re going to take on the school. No, you can’t go back.”

  It was the end of June. “But where will I go?”

  “I don’t know. Sally Lane says Thacher is wonderful. That’s in California. She says it couldn’t be more different from St. Paul’s. We can call them this afternoon and find out if they have a place.”

  “I’m going back,” I told my mom. “I am going to finish.”

  She spat out air. Her hands flew up. “I don’t know that I can send you back. I don’t know that I can stand that.”

  The moment she started to cry, I dried up like a stone. She kept at it, adding a wail here and there, her forehead against the dining room wall. “I don’t know how I’m going to make it through this!”

  I wanted to shake her. Tough shit, I’d have said.

  She turned back from the wall to try again. “Lacy.”

  “What.”

  “The school never told the police. Do you understand that? They never reported. They let the boys graduate. They let them go home. Do you get that?”

  Of course I got that. What of this was news to her? What was so astounding? Rick had won the top athletic award. On Prize Day, he would have hoisted the silver plate high over his head right there, alongside the flagpole.

  “They are going to start college in the fall just like nothing happened.”

  I thought, Good riddance.

  “The Concord Police would like to investigate with an eye to pressing charges. It is a statutory claim and there seems to be little dispute about what, um…went on. You know, what they did.” She gripped her throat to demonstrate.

  I felt a small surge of courage. Since Dr. Kerrow had explained to me about statutory consent, I’d held the idea like a fabulous gemstone—too precious to trot out, almost vulgar to wear, but a resource that might buy me passage in war. The law, it turns out, anticipates naivete, or at least allows that when a child and an adult engage in a sexual act, power will occupy so much of the province of desire (if indeed there is any) that wanting would be inauthentic. Consent is not possible. No matter what anyone else claimed, the law said it was not my fault.

  “Well, that’s fine,” I told my mom. I would be happy to tell the truth. “What do I have to do?”

  “They’l
l put you on the stand and ask you to testify against the boys. And maybe against the school. I don’t know yet. We’ll have to hire a lawyer.”

  “Why do I need a lawyer?”

  “To protect you. The district attorney told me that this has happened time and time again. That a child is assaulted on that campus, and the school covers it up.”

  I did not care about other children. I didn’t know who they were and I figured they’d have to take care of themselves, just as I had.

  She was steeled almost to the point of delight. “Angel, I think it’s time to blow this thing sky-high. I really think it’s time.”

  Whose time, exactly? They’d sent me to St. Paul’s, and they’d made me stay, and now I’d be damned if I gave all of that up—watched the school transform into something not just challenging but antagonistic, with its sights set on my future. No, ma’am. I was going to graduate if it killed me.

  “I don’t want to do anything,” I said. “I just want to go back.”

  “Just think about it,” Mom pleaded. “Please just think about it?”

  I told her I would.

  Dad then had a difficult conversation with the rector. My father prided himself on sensibility and calm. He was not impulsive or hotheaded or easily swayed. He set up his pad of quadrille paper, clicked out a few millimeters of lead, and told Reverend Clark that we weren’t making progress. Would any notice be sent to the boys’ colleges? Would the school be talking to the parents of the boys?

  Why wasn’t any of that happening?

  And yes, Dad said, his daughter did wish to return for the sixth form, of course, as planned, and he and Mom were sure the school would do everything in its power to welcome me back—as a community of faith, as a community of scholars. I was an excellent student who contributed across a range of sports and activities. Every single report attested to this.

  The rector didn’t have much to offer. The boys had graduated and were no longer under the school’s supervision. I was not on campus. By all accounts save mine, the encounter had been consensual. I’d waited so long to say something. If I’d been so upset, why hadn’t I alerted a teacher or adviser straightaway? Dozens of teachers on campus knew me and would have been in a position to help. I’d had literally hundreds of occasions to speak up. And I had chosen not to until now? Perhaps this was best left to the adolescents to understand. Perhaps the adults might acknowledge, with deep regret, that there really was nothing to discuss.

  The rector did not admit that only one side had a legal obligation to report the assault to the police, and it wasn’t me. The school had failed this first test. The Concord Police knew nothing about it until my pediatrician called them. It just so happened that the delay meant they couldn’t interview the boys before they left the state.

  The rector only said, Why didn’t Lacy tell anyone?

  Dad replied, She did. That’s why we’re having this conversation.

  Even he, who habitually saw the best until his face was smashed up against the worst, began to think the district attorney was on to something.

  “I think we should sue the school,” said Mom. “It’s the only way to force them to admit what happened.”

  My father sighed. “You might be right.”

  My brother, coming up that summer on his twelfth birthday, raised his red hair from his dinner plate. Where had he been all June, all July? I have no idea. Day camps, friends’ homes, down the hall sorting baseball cards.

  “What does it mean to sue?” he asked.

  “It means take them to task,” said Mom.

  “Your mother means to say that it’s a legal proceeding whereby we seek redress in the courts for a dispute the two parties can’t solve themselves,” corrected Dad.

  “Oh.”

  I said, “But then I can’t go back.”

  “No,” said Mom.

  “No,” said Dad.

  My brother said, “Will you come home?”

  I told him no.

  “Well, you could,” said Dad, half-heartedly.

  “But what about Princeton?”

  Dad pressed his mouth into a line. His chin crinkled when he did this, like a little boy just about to cry. “We’ll just have to try to explain it in your application.”

  “So I have to write about this? And have everyone there know about it?”

  I imagined a future where I might be just a new kid at school, trailing no scandal. But St. Paul’s had already taken care of this. I was trapped. It had been genius to gather up my schoolmates, tell them I was sick, then send them out into the world for the summer. How quickly their words spread. My freshman year in college, late one night, a sophomore I’d never met emerged from the other side of the road, calling to my companion, “Hey, she’s got herpes.” Years after graduation, the man I was dating out in California attended a major theatrical opening in New York City directed by a close friend. The director also taught, and a few of his students were there that night—much younger, they had overlapped with me at university. My boyfriend mentioned my name. One of them replied, “Oh yes, she’s cool, but watch out: she’s got herpes.”

  I would always be the one left gasping, wondering how on earth to reply. What should I say? Yes, but it wasn’t my fault? Yes, but you could never catch it from me, unless you did that?

  My brother, James Ellis Crawford IV, was heading into the sixth grade. Already my family was talking about whether to send him to Groton as a second former, in the eighth grade—Groton was one of the few schools that still accepted boys so young. They were assigned little curtained cubicles like the sleeping car of a train. We’d seen these spaces on our tour years ago when I’d gone to look at boarding schools.

  Groton was the only school one might, with a certain lens, consider on a par with St. Paul’s. Andover and Exeter were rigorous, sure, but they were huge. The rest were lovely. But Groton was tiny and old and it was where Jed Lane had gone, and all the rest of the Lanes too. My brother would have felt it mandatory that he take his place in this precious and arcane little world. So the castle shaking for me meant the castle shaking for him—already he’d have known that.

  He asked, “Why would you sue St. Paul’s?”

  And my mother replied, “To make them tell the truth, sweetheart.”

  “About what they did to Lacy?”

  “Well, yes. About what was done to Lacy.”

  “By two boys.”

  “Men,” said my father.

  “Yes,” said Mom.

  “Which was very bad,” said my brother.

  “Yes,” said Dad.

  “A sexual assault,” said James, the words unfamiliar in his mouth.

  My parents looked at each other.

  Dad said, “That’s right.”

  My brother, knowing not to ask any more questions, nodded. Then he gave me his version of my father’s flat-line, wrinkly-chin sympathy sigh.

  “Got it,” he said.

  Mom, crying again, excused herself to go upstairs.

  Up in my room, I imagined a courtroom: dark-paneled, not unlike Coit Dining Hall at school. Benches like pews. I had the pacing attorneys, for and against, borrowed from television dramas. They asked me what happened. Rick and Taz were seated across the way, shoulders rounded, heads hung in a simulacrum of humility. My mother cried somewhere beyond my line of sight. The lawyers would ask me: But you went to their room, did you not? Against school rules? And you did not run away or scream or punch them, am I correct? Yes or no, Miss Crawford. Yes or no.

  And onward from there, to Budge, who would appear now a few rows back, his coxcomb hair bleached with summer, sidekick at his shoulder. Beside him, Johnny Devereux. Then dear Timothy Macalester, the wide-smiling, clear-hearted hippie. Like Scrooge’s ghosts, they’d show who I was and how I’d come this way. My parents would understand they’d raised a slut. I was almost reconciled to this discovery; I was almost certain there was no escaping it. But the telos of my agony that summer was not, ultimately, my parents’ idea of me.
It was the Möbius strip of logic that would give my behavior since the assault as proof that the assault was not an assault at all. They’d say, You wanted this. Even if you didn’t think you did, even if you didn’t say so, you wanted it.

  Take away anything, I thought. My school, my friends, my parents’ love. But do not dare tell me what I wanted, who I was on that night when I took your call and thought that you were sad.

  That’s why the memory of Rick carrying me after the bike accident had moved me when nothing else could. I saw myself in his arms: a girl who was hurt and needed help. No one would deny it. He—even he—had seen it too. That’s why he’d picked me up and brought me up the hill.

  Once I’d been reminded of her, whom I had banished all year, something low in me started to burn.

  In July, a formal call came in. The school, in concert with legal counsel from the well-regarded Concord firm of Orr & Reno, wished to communicate a few things.

  My father got out his graph paper. I was not invited into the library for the call, so I stayed upstairs in my room, with my door closed, and stared out the window over our driveway. It was short and opened onto the central artery through town, a two-lane country road lined with mature trees. In the summer you drove in a tunnel of green. I heard cars whooshing through and saw the shudder in the leaves above the fences a second later.

  A knock at my door. My parents came in, looking pale.

  I moved from my window to my twin bed and folded myself up in the middle of it. My parents stood side by side in front of me. Sitting small, I said, “What’s up?”

  Dad was the only one of them to speak. “The lawyer for the school says that you are not welcome to return to campus.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Well, they have a list of things here that they are prepared to say about you. That is, if you agree to press charges against the boys, they will get you on the stand, and here’s what they’re going to say.”

  He held up his graph pad and read.

  “One, Lacy is a drug user.